


One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts

by recoveringrabbit



Series: A Love Story With Detective Interruptions [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Albert Einstein - Freeform, F/M, honeymoon fluff, john donne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 22:32:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7193582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/recoveringrabbit/pseuds/recoveringrabbit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On their honeymoon, the new Mr. and Mrs. Fitz-Simmons discuss poetry both physical and metaphysical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One fire of four inflaming eyes, and of two loving hearts

**Author's Note:**

> In honor of Dorothy L. Sayers's birthday, please accept this little piece. I first met John Donne in her works, and MBM FitzSimmons is both an homage to the most perfect OTP that will ever be, and as close as I would dare come to writing Lord Peter and Harriet. If I can be a quarter as good as she was, I will be content.
> 
> The title is from Donne's poem "Epithalamion", a wedding song.

Try as he might, Fitz couldn’t concentrate on his book. Not that _The Evolution of Physics_ wasn’t interesting, or that he wasn’t pleased to have time to finally read it, but how could he be expected to maintain interest in the mechanical scaffold of field theory when his nearly brand-new wife sat curled up on the other end of the sofa? His _wife_ , he thought with all the natural awe of a man on his honeymoon, and settled back to gleefully admire his own private work of art. _Woman Studying_ , he might call it. Clad in a white linen dress, her shoes and stockings abandoned on the floor below, she had tucked up her feet to rest a book against her knees and leave space for a heavy tome on the cushion between them. He cocked his head, curious. Every time he looked up in the last hour, her forehead had been creased in confusion as she traced the lines with her finger. He couldn’t imagine the subject that would stymie Jemma for longer than fifteen minutes at the most. Finally succumbing to the potent mix of curiosity and the desire to hear her voice, he wrapped a hand around her ankle and leaned his head against the back of the sofa. “What’re you reading?”

She didn’t look up, merely using her foot to nudge aside the book between them. “Metaphysical poetry.”

Of all the answers he had entertained, that had never come up. “Poetry?” he repeated incredulously, “really? What on earth—”

She sighed, sticking a pencil into the book to hold her place before shutting it with prejudice. “I was reading the detective story Pepper recommended—quite clever, and by a fellow Shrewsburian—anyway, it had an epigraph that piqued my interest. Normally, you know, I don’t pay much attention to poetry, but this made me think of us. Let me find it.” Twisting to reach behind her, she plucked a book from the stack on the table behind her and opened it to the dedication page. “‘But we by a love so much refined/that our selves know not what it is/inter-assured of the mind/care less eyes, lips, and hands to miss.’”

“I would miss your eyes and lips and hands,” he said, taking one of the latter and pressing a kiss to the palm.

Her fingers caressed his cheek, soft as her warm honey gaze. “Of course, Fitz. It was ‘inter-assured of the mind’. Poetry in general is so frilly, so foreign to what I feel, I thought maybe—”

“A poet who understood,” he finished. “Who is it?”

“John Donne.” She showed him the book from her lap, a shabby red volume with gold lettering. “They had a copy in the English library here. It’s from a poem called ‘[Valediction: Forbidding Mourning](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44131).’”

“And?”

She huffed, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “Perhaps _he_ understands, but _I_ don’t. That’s why I’ve pulled out the dic. All the words together make sense, to a certain extent, but the meaning escapes me entirely.”

“I might’ve known,” he said, “it had to be something clean out of the field to make you look like that. You’re awfully one-sided, Simmons.”

“That hasn’t been a problem for you in the past,” she said, mouth pursed up in prim amusement.

“And it isn’t now.” He held out his hand invitingly. “Let me see it. The poem.”

Hesitating, she raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Sweetheart, you know how much I think of your intelligence, but it isn’t a secret that I am better at figurative thinking. If I can’t understand it—”

“Ho, now,” he said, sitting up sharply in mock-incredulity, “now you’re insulting my genius. Give it here, woman, so I can defend myself.”

“Masculine preening,” she muttered just loud enough for him to hear, but handed over the book regardless. Opening to the page, he skimmed the poem quickly, then more slowly, then slower still. The fourth time through, he heard Jemma’s laugh ring out triumphantly. “I told you, Fitz. It’s incomprehensible, isn’t it?”

“Impenetrable,” he agreed, dazedly. “What does this mean: ‘dull sublunary lovers’ love’?”

“Oh,” she said excitedly, shifting to tuck her feet beneath her, “I have decoded that bit. It’s a reference to medieval cosmology, the belief that anything under the moon—according to the old organization of the planets, of course—was somehow base or inferior, not in its purest form. That’s why the love in the next stanza is refined. It’s not that bit that’s confusing me. What’s this about compasses?”

He read the last three stanzas again as she continued. “Because there isn’t any such thing as twin compasses, are there? And what is moving? The needle? But of course they must both move if one does, since they must necessarily point north. And is the circle the circle of the compass? Or the globe?”

“Neither,” he said distractedly, stuck on the last two lines.

“What is it, then?”

“It’s a circle.”

“Pardon me?”

He looked up then to see the confusion even stronger on her face, mixed with a hint of exasperation. “It’s just a circle, Simmons. You’re thinking of the wrong compass. It’s not the direction sort, it’s the one you use to draw circles. The little pincer-looking things?”

“I know what you mean, thank you. But I still don’t see—”

“Look,” he said, holding up his index fingers so their tips touched. “When you use a compass, one leg stays steady while the other moves around it, yeah?”

“Yes,” she agreed, frowning.

“But it doesn’t stay quite steady—it has to turn in place while the drawing leg goes round. And look”—he widened his hands and thus the base of his triangle, indicating a larger circumference. “When the moving leg widens, the steady leg has to lean to follow it, like it says here: ‘and leans and hearkens after it’.”

Although his explanation was, he flattered himself, quite clear, her frown remained. “But the legs of a compass are attached. Lovers are separate people; they don’t have that same connection.”

“But they do,” he said, jabbing his finger at the middle of the page, “see, he says, ‘our two souls therefore, which are one.’ He thinks they’re one like the compasses, which has two distinct parts that make a whole.”

Taking the book back from him, she ran her eyes over the lines once more. “I see,” she said slowly, “but I don’t understand. Either you’re one or you’re two, and I do love you, Fitz, but we aren’t one person. Thankfully.”

He didn’t have to see her gaze dart to the bed to know what she meant, and he flushed before picking up his own book again. “So we have finally found something Jemma Simmons—”

“ _Fitz_ -Simmons.”

His heart did its now usual jig at the reminder. “—isn’t good at.”

“Well,” she said casually, dropping poor Donne to join her shoes, “the novel was good, at least. What are you reading?”

He showed her the cover. “It’s fascinating, obviously—Einstein really attacks the flaws he sees in quantum mechanics—” He stopped, struck with an idea. “Simmons, it’s like the EPR paradox.”

“What is?” she asked, amusedly resting her hand on the back of his neck.

“The poem. The two feet of the compass are the two particles that can’t be observed without affecting the other.”

“But that was just a thought experiment, I thought?”

“It is,” he said, turning to face her more fully and gesturing with both hands as the idea solidified in his head, “but the atoms aren’t—they actually have observed atoms acting the way described. They’re separate, but still exerting a force on each other—well, not a force exactly, but what one does affects the other—”

“I know the theory, a little,” she said, brow furrowing once more, “so you’re suggesting that lovers exert influence on each other despite being separate? More, that they cannot act without affecting the other?”

“Yes. Well, not _all_ lovers, and neither is Donne. It’s only those who are connected by their minds who are like this, who orbit each other and lean to each other and make the circle just—that is, exact, faithful, true. Their connection makes them that way, and thus not dependent on eyes and lips and han—”

She choked off the last word by crashing her lips to his, her hands bracketing his face while his flew automatically to her waist. It was heady, the joy of intimate knowledge, and breath-taking, and when she moved he matched her and he wasn’t sure if he was circling her in ever dizzying arcs or leaning and hearkening after her as she spun giddily. Maybe both. But all compasses must return to where they begin, eventually, and she slowed and stopped and leaned her forehead, now perfectly serene, against his. Her eyelashes fluttered, but stayed closed.

“You’re a poet, Fitz. A physical poet.”

“No such thing,” he breathed.

“There should be. Science is beautiful too.” Then she slowly opened her eyes, filling him with gold. “Perhaps Donne does understand, if it comes to it.”

He shook his head, but not enough to move it from hers. “He doesn’t. Or he would know that the connection of the minds only makes one care _more_ for the eyes and lips and hands. And other things.”

Something dangerous sparked in her gaze. “Oh, he knows. There’s [another poem](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/50340) in here I found—perhaps we should study that one next.”


End file.
